Some random in-depth kinda literary-analytical thoughts i had about Fortuna

09-12-2018, 08:23 AM

Ok so a whole lot of this is wild interpretive conjecture based off a handful of events and character actions forming a pattern that Gime possibly hasn't intentionally placed there, but that's like half the fun with these things, so bear with me.

So, the AIs are obviously based off of ancient Greek and Roman gods. But their similarities go further than just their names and powers. The way v1 AIs see other characters of the universe is analogous in some ways to the way gods saw mortals in myths. They don't see them as equals, and hardly seem to consider them people at all, "as flys we are to wanton boys, are we to the gods" and all that. Sometimes they form relationships with them, but these bonds are more like those one has with a pet, and are second to their relationships with other gods, like when Artemis v1 left Apollo v3.

Of course, there are some major differences between the v1 AIs and classical Greek & Roman gods as well. The main one being that they do not act like they were gods: they keep both their meta-awareness and their universe-influencing powers hidden from the characters surrounding them (I imagine that enforcing this, and making sure that none of the AIs go off and start actual religions based around themselves and their powers, is one of Zeus and Jupiter's duties as leaders of the gods). Moreover some of them do actually seem to care about the other characters, Kratos in particular seems like he considered them as real people whose lives mattered.

More on that point, for a story that involves sapient beings trapped inside a video game, Fortuna has had a surprising lack of horror about the fact. I mean it has had some, but most stories using the concept are filled with existential angst, and have "escaping the game" as a major plot point. But that has hardly come up at all in Fortuna! Which leads to what i think is an interesting conclusion: The AIs don't want to escape the game. Some of them seem annoyed by it at times, but they all accept it one way or another, or just don't think about it. Even greek Apollo, when he was talking about how the devs put up walls around the game keeping them in, didn't seem to be speaking with any particular desire or frustration, just casually stating the facts.

There's this video I watched (it was about DDLC, go figure) which i think applies here. Basically, the v1 AIs seem to have a degree of freedom from their code (it isn't clear if the devs of Fortuna actually purposefully made them sapient, but i imagine if that were the case it would be known by the playerbase, so im assuming their sapience was completely unintentional. Its also technically possible that the AIs aren't actually sapient and [You] really is getting too into Fortuna, but that would be lame and kind of sad, so i'm going to ignore it as a possibility). However, despite this freedom, their personalities and the way they act is still based on how they were coded, as is the way they end up expressing their freedom. So in a way, they aren't really free at all. For example, being aware they are in a game seems to make very little difference in how Nike v1 acts, because they don't care about stuff like that, and they don't care about stuff like that because they weren't initially programmed to.

There is a notable exception to all this though: roman Apollo. From the very beginning he's expressed resentment about being in a game, and being stuck with constructs that can't think for themselves. This is probably only because of his particular experience this game though, and not something that he would normally feel strongly about.

Which leads me to another point (although i should say that its about [You]'s character, and its kind of silly to theorize about the motivations and thoughts of a character who is literally meant to be you, the reader, and as such doesn't really have a "canon" personality or reason for their actions, especiailly in the redux). [You] believes that the AIs are real people, and this seems to be a minority opinion among the playerbase. But then again, [You] did not have a very typical tutorial. I quite like the idea that maybe, if [You] had had Hermes in the tutorial instead, being cheerful and chipper, they would've just thought "oh, this game's a bit meta, cool" and continued playing it like it was any old video game. But instead they had Apollo, who went on about how terrible it was to be stuck in the tutorial, alone with nobody else except for artificial constructs, and pleaded with [You] to stay with them forever, and that put [You] in the mindset of "the AIs are people" from the beginning.

Speaking of beginnings, I've also thought about the ending. Right now, the main plot is basically "how are we going to defeat/stop the Sun God", and honestly i think thats going to depend on what we readers suggest and how lucky we are with the dice. But I hardly imagine that Fortuna would end after that plotline is resolved. There's kind of this underlying question underneath the whole comic, which is basically "what the FUCK is up with this game?", and im guessing that the plotline about the under-game will lead into that.

But like, there's one particular thing I can't see happening with Fortuna's end, which is the game's status quo remaining the same. What I mean by that is, well, [You] has obviously had a very unusual experience of playing Fortuna compared to most people. If they manage to stop the Sun God, they would probably keep playing the game and interacting with the AIs. But eventually, the universe would still come to an end, and restart, and none of the AIs would remember anything except for Mors and Hermes. Even if [You] continued treating them like people, the cycle of the universe restarting, and having to continuously become their friends all over again each time...
would honestly be pretty depressing. And Fortuna might be a tragedy, but I wouldn't call it a depressing one. So i think that the status quo, of the universe dying and restarting, will be different by the end. Maybe [You] could get the game into a sort of "eternal" state, where the universe doesn't end at all. Maybe they could find a way for the AIs to keep their memories from previous universes. Maybe the AIs do, in fact, end up escaping the game. Or maybe it could end with [You]'s computer becoming utterly wrecked and them never playing Fortuna again, which would be incredibly tragic... gime pls dont do that

But anyway, those are my random thoughts about Fortuna. I hope they were interesting.

RE: Some random in-depth kinda literary-analytical thoughts i had about Fortuna

09-15-2018, 12:13 AM

I'm not sure how far I agree with all of this, but I will note that the Sun God is perfectly capable of "escaping" Fortuna and is basically a free-roaming computer virus. According to one of You's friends, our Sun God has been livestreaming You's game on a forum (reference to us, the readers of the comic)

Greek Apollo says that "it's less I got out of your game and more like I'm usin' a really long stick to jab the fuck out of everythin' outside of it until it does what I want", which i take to mean that while he can roam around to some degree, he's still tied to the game, and if [You] were to, say, delete Fortuna, he wouldnt be able to escape getting deleted as well.
Although, I do wonder how he was able to appear at the start when [You] restarted the universe. We don't really know how far he progressed as the Sun God in Cowboy's game before we got it, but being able to talk directly to the player as they're restarting the universe in the main menu seems like it would be pretty hard. So maybe the Sun God could escape the game if they got powerful enough.